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Chapter 3: Centrifuge
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For a few seconds, they saw the Master standing next to the familiar blue phone-box of the Doctor's TARDIS, an expression of fear and- was that concern?- on his face as he reached for the door but, before he could try anything stupid and time-line altering, a group of Daleks appeared from around the corner. Immediately, without warning, the unfortunate Daleks were blasted by laser bolts.
The Master was either furious, distraught, or otherwise unhinged beyond his usual mental state. He snarled as more of the metallic fiends arrived on the scene, converging on their main target of the Doctor's TARDIS, and he continued to fire on them with all the skill and precision of a fully trained sniper, one shot per Dalek, no survivors. But more just kept coming.
Hermione quickly set up a shielding charm around the group, and hissed, "What happened to not affecting the timeline, hmm?"
"Oh, shut up, human." the Master snarled, not interrupting his assault on the army of Daleks. It seemed like every Dalek on Earth had decided to start swarming down on their location, probably because they'd detected the Doctor's presence.
"What's going on?" Lucy asked, terrified, hiding behind the three Gryffindors. Draco was next to the Master, firing impediment jinxes, which at least slowed the Daleks a bit, even if he couldn't kill them like the laser beams could. He did try Sectumsempra, Incendio and a few other damaging spells, but they all had no effect.
"The Doctor's been hurt." Draco answered.
"Sometimes I wonder how you know these things." the Master grumbled, "You knew exactly where to be and when all last year."
"Before then, actually. I knew well enough in advance to apply for that job BEFORE you showed up on Earth."
"Smug dumb ape." the Master repeated. Then he seemed to freeze for a second. Luckily the Daleks' numbers had been thinned enough for this to not be a fatal mistake. In fact, they'd stopped advancing completely.
"Took him long enough." the Master muttered.
"Funny how you act like you're trying to kill him so often, but as soon as he's in danger you want to save him." Draco noted, amused.
"Bite me." the Master snarked.
"Say that to Greyback." Draco retorted.
Unfortunately for this perfect comeback, the Master did not know who or what Fenrir Greyback was, and stared blankly for half a second to show it.
"We need to leave." Draco said, breaking the ominious silence before it could begin.
"Why?" Hermione asked.
"More of them are coming." Draco said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, "And we do actually need to let him get captured if he's going to save the universe."
"I always hated that plan. It's one of his favourite, isn't it?" the Master asked, smirking sardonically, "Get caught by the enemy, then somehow miraculously escape and win."
"Worked well for me, too." Harry put in brightly.
The Master shook his head and muttered, "Really annoying."
"I bet it was." Draco said, returning to their TARDIS, which had managed to look like a lamp post, and yet still it was possible to step inside it. The door itself was bigger than the surface it was in without appearing to be so.
The others followed, just as bewildered by the dimensional distortion as he was. And they're wizards, they're not supposed to be surprised by the illogical and the very improbable.
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They had watched on the view-screen as the Daleks showed up and took away the very conspicuous blue phone-box that was the Doctor's TARDIS. Their own TARDIS remained happily unremarkable and was completely ignored by the Daleks. "Gotta love chameleon circuits that actually work." the Master muttered, amused by this small detail. No one else understood what he meant.
Several minutes passed, "Are you sure there's nothing else we can do?" Harry demanded for the dozenth time.
"Positive." Draco said, frowning at thin air as he considered it, "There are plenty of other people trying to stop the Daleks, we'd just get in the way. There's two Doctors, five former companions of the Doctor, two more humans from another dimension, a mechanical dog, two supercomputers, a rift in space and time, about two dozen nuclear warheads, a nova diamond and a pterodactyl all trying to mess with the Daleks. Really, they'll be fine without our interference right now."
"What's a nova diamond?" the Master asked.
"It's our term for what I think the Doctor called a warpstar."
"They're one of the five things that could theoretically destroy a horcrux, but they'd probably take the planet with them. No one's been dumb enough to set one off before." Hermione put in, helpfully.
"Wonderful, you humans are better armed than I thought. You could have planted one of those on the Valiant and-"
"And killed the Doctor? I'm not that dumb an ape, thank you very much." Draco interrupted.
The Master actually laughed at this.
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It had been about five minutes since the Doctor's TARDIS had been captured when the Master looked up at the ceiling as if looking at something he saw beyond it, "I had wondered when you said two. There's three. You know that, right?"
"Technicalities." Draco muttered.
"Huh?" Ron asked, looking up from where he'd been playing exploding snap with Harry to pass the time. Much to the Master's displeasure, there were now marks from explosions all over his nice shiny TARDIS' floor.
"Do you want him to go into a detailed explanation that only the best Muggle scientists could have a hope of following, or do you just want to accept the fact the Doctor's about to blow up the Dalek Crucible and save all twenty-seven planets that they stole?" Draco asked, amused at Ron's completely bewildered expression.
"Alright, sheesh." Ron grumbled, throwing another card down and causing yet another explosion which made the Master flinch.
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About half an hour of silence passed, and then very suddenly an alarm went off. "That can't good." Draco muttered, picking himself up from where he'd been watching the card game and trying to figure out a way to play poker with an exploding deck and still be able to bluff.
"Depends on your perspective. If you're alive and on Earth, then it's probably very bad, yes." the Master said blithely.
"What's going on?" Hermione asked, fear creeping into her voice.
"The Doctor has done something very stupid, overlooked something so incredibly obvious." the Master answered, making no effort to stop whatever had gone wrong. "And considering there's three of him, and none of them thought of it, well that's three times as stupid, now isn't it?"
The ground started shaking now, and they were all sure that it was the Earth rather than the TARDIS.
"Earthquake." Ron declared succinctly.
"Three times in one day you say something intelligent. Are we sure you're really Ronald Weasley?" Draco snarked, receiving a glare from Ron for it.
"Why is there an earthquake?" Hermione asked.
"Not just one. The whole planet, actually." the Master said, his eyes glazed as if he was perceiving something no human could, but he was still making absolutely no effort to do anything.
"WHY?!" Hermione yelled, almost in the Master's ear, though he didn't even bat an eye at the volume of her voice.
He sighed dramatically, as if he was being severely put out by their constant blathering, and went to look at the readouts on the control panel, "The idiot is actually towing the planet. By a geographically fixed anomaly. And he's not made any effort to compensate for rotational stresses."
"Meaning? In plain dumb ape English, please?" Draco asked coldly.
"The Earth has stopped spinning, and it's causing every tectonic plate on the planet to go nuts. In about five minutes it'll get serious enough to do some real damage. Earthquakes like your puny human minds have never imagined before, tearing continents to pieces. Every active volcano going off at once. That sort of fun thing. And it will take at least twenty minutes through the vortex to get back to where we should be, so no hope of a pit-stop to fix things." considering the fact he was sitting on the Earth at the moment, the Master sounded supremely unconcerned. Then again, he was already dead. Sort of.
"We have to do something!" Harry shouted at the Master, who just yawned pointedly and looked at his fingernails in a bored fashion. Harry glared at him for a second, then got a vicious grin on his face for a second, and turned to Lucy. Suddenly he was smiling sweetly, saccharine that could rot your teeth sort of sweet, "What were you thinking about earlier? Something about last year?" he asked innocently.
The Master's head shot up and he was now glaring at Harry coldly. If looks could kill... too bad for him he wasn't a Basilisk.
Lucy blinked, and glanced at the Master fearfully. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw the Master flinch.
"He can't hurt you, you don't have to share what you're thinking with the rest of us, just keep thinking about it." Harry coaxed, his tone encouraging as if he was back in the Room of Requirement teaching another student a particularly tricky spell.
After a second, the Master cringed, then clutched at his head in pain, "Stop it!" he yelled.
"Don't stop." Harry countered. There was authority in his voice now. Suddenly everyone here could see him for his true destiny, the power to lead that had given the wizarding world hope against Voldemort all those years ago. The grim avenging angel that does what must be done to save those he fights for. Not for the greater good, no, nothing so altruistic, but for those he loves and only for them.
"Deja-vu." Draco muttered, thinking of the Doctor's victory last year. Even though no actual magic was expended in the emotion Harry projected, they could all feel it in the air. Irresistible, beyond even the compulsion of the Imperius.
Lucy closed her eyes and concentrated on the memories that hurt her Master. Tears were running down her cheeks, she didn't want to hurt him, but he needed to see reason.
Soon the Master was screaming, as he fell to his knees, digging his nails into his scalp and trying to pull on his hair to try to make the pain go away. "Stop it, please!" he begged, "I'll do what you want, just please make her stop!"
On hearing his surrender, Lucy broke down into sobs, falling to her own knees and turning her thoughts to anything else. She couldn't comprehend how those memories had caused him pain, and that added to her distress.
The Master took a couple of seconds to recover, then with a vicious glare at Harry he picked himself up, brushing imaginary dust off his clothes, and turned to the console. Draco was already waiting to follow his commands to operate the TARDIS, his face a cold mask, as if even he was a bit frightened of Harry right now. Not that Draco Malfoy would ever admit to being afraid of Harry Potter. Nope, never.
Hermione knelt next to Lucy, trying to comfort her, "Shh, it's ok. You did the right thing, it'll be ok." she whispered, over and over in different permutations of the same sentiment.
Ron gaped at Harry, and then put in, "Nice one, mate." in spite of his shock that his best friend had chosen to cause pain to at least one innocent being (and one not-so-innocent) to achieve their goal.
"One pair of hands isn't quite enough." the Master declared, "I need one person over here." he moved to the far side of the control console. Ron was there before anyone else could volunteer, "Watch this, relative kinetic displacement readout. If it goes over nine hundred pull this lever down. Once we start, if it goes under seven hundred push it up. Can you do that?"
Ron nodded, and put his hand on the lever, ready. The Master gave him a suspicious look, as if he was absolutely certain no good could come of this human touching technology of any sort.
"And here." the Master moved round to another part of the controls. Since Hermione was still comforting Lucy, Harry approached the console warily. "These three buttons, inertial stabilizer controls. If the light next to one turns red, press it. Do not touch them otherwise."
Harry nodded to show he understood, unlike with Ron, the Master made no derogatory insinuation (body-language, or otherwise) towards Harry's ability to do what needed to be done. The Master then returned to the main section of the console he had been standing at before, where Draco was waiting.
The Master's hands moved over the TARDIS controls, Draco following him perfectly, as if he knew the sequences as well as the Master- a completely false impression, the Master could have been trying to activate the self-destruct sequence to kill them all and Draco would have been none the wiser.
Soon their TARDIS was moving, a shuddering that was quite unlike either the earthquake or traversing the vortex shook them, causing Ron and Harry to almost lose their footing. Luckily the three humans managed to hold onto the console, and Draco kept up with the Master who was smugly incorporeal and unaffected by the shaking.
Within a few moments, they stabilised again, and the Master spoke with a glare at anyone who dared meet his eyes, "We are now exerting a gravitational pull at the appropriate latitude, it's not ideal but it should hold the planet together for the duration of the journey."
"Thank you." Harry said a bit too politely.
The Master directed a Gallifreyan swear word at Harry and proceeded to sulk. Draco snickered when he heard it, having a good guess as to this one's meaning. The number of times he'd heard it directed at Captain Jack, he was fairly sure he'd figured it out as meaning 'being who goes back in time to meet their past self and have sex with themselves'. He could be wrong about that guess, though. But Jack's remarks about it led Draco to believe this was the correct translation of the word.
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